In a recent trip to the Verizon store, We were getting a new phone, and the salesman talked me into buying more stuff. Unusual, but in this case I had been wanting a tablet for awhile but was never sure that it was something that I would use a whole lot. The deal was $20 for the LG G Pad 7 tablet after a $75 mail-in-rebate, and of course its Verizon, so you have to agree to spend more on a monthly basis for it, in this case it was $10/month for the data plan. Considering most of the time it gets used in the house, it would have been cheaper to have bought a tablet without LTE and Verizon Data, but I have only used it a few times away from home, but it was nice not having to worry about having a secure WiFi network to join.

So first for the specs, to get a full description you can go to: GSMarena but the main parts are the 1.2 ghz quad-core, and the 1gb of RAM. I would have liked to see more RAM, maybe even a faster CPU but it still performs fairly decent I can definitely tell it is slower than my HTC ONE M7 but that also has a 1.9ghz quad-core and 2gb of RAM. Especially when playing Clash Of Clans.

My major complaints first are that Chrome (the default browser) crashes when I have more than 3 tabs open for an extended period of time. This is irritating, but I understand it doesn’t have a lot of RAM. The most irritating thing was the keyboard crashing on a regular basis. It didn’t matter what app I was in I could time a word or two and the keyboard would close on me. I ended up installing the Google Keyboard, which I like better anyway. Chrome still crashes occasionally though. Browsing pages with a lot of pictures also makes the scrolling jitter when I scroll down the page.

The nicest things I have found about the LG G Pad 7 is the battery life. I use it daily probably an average of 3 hours a day and the battery lasted from Sunday morning until Thursday night, and when I plugged it in I still had around 19% remaining, so great battery life in my opinion. Another great feature it has, is the double-tap of the screen to turn it on or off. Useful mainly when turning the device on. The device is exceptionally thin and the screen looks great.

Overall, I am glad we made the choice of getting the tablet, It is a lot more convenient than carrying around my surface. Also when I have to stop using it to do something else for a minute it is nice that it fits in my back pocket, although it is a tight fit, it is totally impossible to do this with my Surface Pro 2, and it is much lighter. Brings me to one more thing about my surface is the lock button, it will occasionally shut the Surface off entirely, but I suppose that is a story for another post. The tablet is super light and convenient to carry around the house to browse the web, and I can easily cast to our Roku Stream Sticks that are in our TVs. I think the LG G Pad 7 is a device worth having, it has its issues, but they are software issues, and those can probably be fixed with root and a ROM. The specs are on the low side, but that is fine because its sold as a mid-range tablet, and certainly isn’t a top of the line device. I think its worth considering if you can get a good deal on it.